HOA & COA Guide to Multi-Family Re-Roofing Project

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Good morning everybody and thank you for joining us. This is a great panel we've got planned for you today. We're happy that, so far, we've got 176 people joining us today. That's huge. We really appreciate that and we're glad that we see a lot of return faces, so I'll take that as a compliment that we're delivering some value for you all and we hope to continue to do that. So today, we're going to talk about reroofing projects, best practices for reroofing projects and this is going to be directed at multifamily buildings, obviously, so we're not talking about single family units. Obviously, those folks typically have to take care of themselves. But if you're an association that has maintenance and repair responsibility for a building's roofs, this is going to be a really, I think and I hope, a good walkthrough of best practices that you can all take to ensure that your project goes smoothly, little risk to the association or as little risk as possible to the association and that you wind up with a completed project that's defect free and will serve your association and its buildings for a long time to come. This applies to both condos and, typically in the HOA world, town home communities.

Why is this timely? You probably are seeing a lot of activity from your insurance carriers in terms of insurance carriers staring to say it's time to reroof your buildings. We're about 15 years out from the building boom prior to the recession and so you've got a lot of buildings that are approaching or have seen 15 years and so a lot of insurance careers are starting to tell you it's time to take care of your roofs. And given what's happened recently over in south Florida, we can expect that insurance companies are going to be even more vigilant and more adamant about building maintenance. We're expecting that a lot of you are going to be dealing with these reroofing projects in the very near future.

We think that we have a lot to bring in terms of advice and best practices. Let me tell you why that is and this may be a little bit against our self-interest as a firm because we handle typically... we do a lot of work in claims, in defect claims, and so we're uniquely suited to see what goes wrong with roofing projects when they don't go right. We know where the problems can be. We've seen all of the areas where things could have been done differently and a project could have... and that could have made a difference in how a project went. Another portion of our practice is to do major repair project consulting and our call to action here today to you folks is if we do have a major roof repair project or roof replacement project, I think there's a lot of people that tend to believe that that's a run of the mill type of thing and it's just a roofing project, but there's a lot that can go wrong and certainly we would encourage you to reach out to a construction lawyer, whether it's our firm or some other firm, and consult with them on the front end because there's a lot of decisions that could be made that can mean a huge difference in the way that your project goes.

What can you do if you have, besides consulting with us or somebody else, another construction lawyer, what can you do to ensure that your project goes smoothly? You can follow the best practices that we're going to run through today. We could spend hours on this, but we're going to give you a 30,000 foot highlight, a snapshot. We're going to talk about a bunch of things today, but obviously any one of these topics we could into in significantly more detail if needed. At the end of the day, I think I want to leave everybody with is the old saying, what did Ben Franklin say? A penny saved, pound foolish. I can't remember. Something like that.

Again, the inclination for roofing projects is that this is a thing that... a kind of a routine type of maintenance project for an association and it's anything but. It's not a time to cut costs, it's a time when an association should be saying, "How do we do this right, do it right the first time, control our risk and make sure that the project is delivered on time, complete, defect free?" because this is one of the primarily defenses to your buildings from water intrusion and the possibility that you could have a poor product, a poor result, which could create a lot of other problems for your building. And as we've seen recently, those problems can multiply, spiral and create significant problems for an association.

Let's just into the subject. Where we want to start is really quickly, and I'm going to introduce Brian Tannenbaum, who's an associate with our firm. He's the next generation of Tannenbaum to be part of our firm, but what Brian is going to talk about real quick is just to remind everybody of what the source of an association's authority is in terms of mainlining and repairing and replacing roofs on your buildings. With that, we're going to have Brian take it away and just cover that real quickly, give us a primer on that subject. Take it away Brian.

Brian Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Fixing the roofs, dealing with the windows, dealing with anything that comes up. But in the context of a multifamily home or a condo, these things are regularly maintained by the association. Now, for a condo, the law comes from Florida Statute 718 chapter 718, which gives the association the responsibility for maintenance of the common elements. It doesn't give an option and there's no ambiguity. It's not vague. It says that maintenance of the common elements is the responsibility of the association. 718.108 defines the common elements as, in part, the condominium property which is not included within the unit. This can be your roof, the balconies in some cases, any part of the condominium that is outside of the unit.

On the other hand in an HOA situation, there is no statutory basis that requires the association to maintain and repair any part of the property. Where the authority comes from is the declaration, so it's important to know what the declaration says about maintenance and repair of the property. For both an HOA and a condo, the board has a fiduciary duty to the members. Because they have a fiduciary duty to the members, it's important that they undertake repairs in a timely and appropriate way so that there's no liability opened up for the association or for the board members. When looking at your documents, you need to know what kind of things is the association responsible for and when do I as a board member or a manger need to make sure that those things get done.

There's a very heavy burden on the association and the board and it's important that those things get taken care of in a timely manner so that you can avoid that liability and that you can keep your building safe and secure.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Okay. Thanks Brian. Just a little segway from something that Brian touched on and I want to explore a little bit further before we move on is, and this is more appropriate to HOAs and town home HOAs than condos because the condo statute is pretty clear about common elements and there's not a similar statute or similar provision in 720, it's important to look at your declarations and understand whether, not just what the declaration requires the association to do, but whether the declarations enable and provide the association with the ability to do that work capably and completely. We've run across a lot of declarations that are typically the original declarations that were drafted by a developer, which are pretty ambiguous about what the associations begin and end in regards to roof replacements or roof repairs is.

If you've got a roof project coming up, you've got a situation where you're needing to replace a roof on a town home building for example, it would be a great time to look at your declarations and ensure that you can complete the job and that you don't have some sort of limitation in the declarations which may prevent you from doing a thorough job. Let me explain what that means. We've run across provisions in declarations where the association is responsible for the roof covering, the membrane or the shingles, but what happens if the roof, if over time there's damage to the framing, to the sheathing, to the roof trusses and that's not specified in the declaration as being part of the association's repair maintenance and repair responsibility? That can create some serious problems for an association.

If you've got a project that you're thinking, that you're expecting down the road, it's time to take a look at the declarations and make sure that you can do that work and that you don't have some ambiguity in your declarations. Folks, if you're in an HOA that's coming out of transition, a perfect time to review the developer's declarations and ensure that the association can do the work that it's going to need to do in order to completely, capably and without problems, without ambiguity discharge its repair obligations. What good is it if an association can only replace shingles, but can't correct damaged sheathing? You leave that to the lot owner and that may never happen and then you're just putting shingles over a problem that's just going to continue to further deteriorate the building, so don't always assume that the declarations are going to provide the association with a clear path to do what it needs to do in order to discharge its obligation.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

It's not only might the declaration impose some limitation on what an HOA can repair, but also arguably you can spend money on investigating the issue if it's not within the association's purview. And for a newer association, obviously the problem is the association can't pursue claims for an HOA for anything it doesn't have maintenance and repair responsibility over, so there's multiple reasons that the documents should be amended beyond just the fact that it constricts the ability of the association to do a full repair.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Well said. Thank you, Alan. So with that, let's turn to the subject of investigation. I'm going to ask my partner, Sal Scro, to talk a little bit about what are best practices in determining what you should be doing, what the scope of a roofing project should encompass because I think a lot of times, we just tend to assume that it's just a question of we're just going to put a new roof on the building. This is a time when an association can really take a good look and see what the scope of work should really be and that may involve some need to do some investigation, maybe bring some engineers in, but I'm probably talking too much and I don't want to steal Salvatore's thunder. So Sal, turning it over to you. Talk about investigation and engineering issues.

Sal Scro, Esq.:

Hi. Good morning everyone. The first thing that we're going to talk about is understanding why your roof may need to be replaced. There's a couple reasons. The first would be it's just an old roof, it's time to replace it. That's usually easy to figure out. You have your reserves. You have your reserve studies that usually tell you what your expected useful life is and you know if it's coming to an end. You can tell by the... if you're experiencing problems with an old roof, but then you may have a roof that's not so old and it may just be a bad roof. If that's the case, there's other things you may want to do versus just having to reroof before you just go out and get somebody to do the reroof on an old roof. If you have a bad roof, you may want to do some other things.

If, for example, you're having water intrusion and it may be coming from... you may have bad stucco and I've talked about this several times, you may cracking stucco. You may have water that's coming in through your windows. Water's going to seek its level. It's going to find its way into your building. That could be... One of the sources could from the roof itself. So any time you're having troubles with a roof, the first thing, my suggestion would be is if it's a fairly new roof, if it's something that has been constructed within 10 years, then I would suggest that you contact an attorney that does this construction defect work because they can recommend you to the right person to do the investigation so that if there is a problem with the construction, then you have the right team together to address that with the potentially liable parties.

If you have just an old roof, then maybe a good roofing company, a consultant or an engineer, but also if you have... The more changes you have in a roof as far as what I'm talking about changes, if you have different directions or slopes or different roof to wall intersections, a lot of valleys where roofs come together, chimneys, then you may want to engage the services of an architecture, an engineer to give you a detailed set of specifications so that the person going to do the work knows exactly what to do to apply the materials, to limit any possibility of water intrusion. That's one of the things.

The other thing that you may want an engineer for is, for example, if you plan on changing the type of material. If you have a shingled roof and you want to put a tile roof on it, you want to put a metal roof on, any changes in material, aside from the fact that you need to get approval from associations if you're a condominium, if you're going to change that, you definitely want to engage the services of a structural engineer because the weight. That's the key, the weight is the difference. If you've ever driven by and seen a roofing project and you see all the materials stacked up on the roof, they're all in different locations and it's not to make it easier so that they don't have to walk so far, it's because if they pile them all up in one spot, they're going to collapse the roof because it just can't handle the weight so it's important that you have engaged an engineer if you're ever going to change materials.

Also, if you have a roof that is a flat roof, that's something also you may want to do some pre investigation of before you just let somebody come in and say, "WE're going to just reroof this. And hey, here's your best way to do it. We can put this material in that will cover it. We can add vents to it so it'll let water evaporate out," all these things, my suggestion would be is do some investigation, particularly with an old flat roof because you have different layers of materials under that roof. What is the condition of each of those materials as you dig down? You don't know and you won't know unless you open it up, so I would suggest bringing an engineer in, having them uncover the roof, look down there and give you a detailed set of specifications.

There's a lot of times you can look at a roof and it looks old, but as you open it up and dig down, you find there's a pool under there, there's water, and you're not going to know that, you're not going to see it unless you open up. So if you have an old flat roof, sometimes it's best just to uncover the entire roof.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Sal, an example of that. We had one recently. It was a built up roof and the contractor came in and said, "We're going to scrap the gravel, the loose gravel off of the built up portion, and then we're going to put a new roof on top of that." Well, it turns out that underneath this built up roof was a lightweight concrete fill that they used a couple of decades ago as roof insulation and the lightweight concrete fill was water saturated. What really then needed to be done on that particular roof was it needed to be taken all the way down to the structural deck and then a new roofing system installed above the original structural deck, but there would have been no way of knowing that unless somebody did a core through the built up roof, determined that it was indeed lightweight fill under that and do some moisture testing to determine what the condition of that is because you can't put a new roof over a bad subsurface. It'll cause a lot of trouble.

Sal Scro, Esq.:

Right. And we just did a testing the other day on a roof. It was metal and then there was a flat TPO roof. It's a Thermoplastic Polyolefin or something like that is the name for it. Anyway, that roof was three or four years old and I tried to get a video to show you, but I couldn't get it to transfer from my phone, but as we did the investigation, I lifted up some of the TPO roof, the flat roof, and I could pick up the sheathing and it would crumble in my hands. This was a roof that was three or four years old, so age isn't always a factor. It's the construction is very important. Why would want detailed specifications? Again, as I stated, the more cuts you have in a roof, the more differentiation in slopes and levels, you're going to want that.

You will also want to look into the... If you're going to have an engineer and they're going to provide year old with a set of specifications, you're going to want to have somebody look at that contract with your engineer as well. Make sure that they don't have a limitation of liability just for the money that you've paid them. The contract for roof, I had a project that we represented clients on, seven multifamily buildings and their contract to do all those seven buildings for hundreds of thousands of dollars, one page. It was a one page contract. It pretty much said, "I'm going to reroof your buildings," and that was it. You want to do an investigation if you have any type of roof that has layers to it, as Alan said, as well, especially those flat roofs.

You're going to want an engineer if you're having trouble because, as I'll talk about later, you want to make sure you look at this information so that you gather your information and your evidence if you need to address it to a potentially liable party, but you also want to engage a confidence defect attorney because you do not want to destroy your evidence if you're going to do that. You want to make sure you gather it appropriately. And also, if you have bids that you're going to receive, it's nice to have a consultant or an architect or an engineer to help you weigh through those bids. They help you get through the minutia of it. And also, they can bring up things that you may not think about, down to the little things like safety requirements, access to the building during construction for your owners, daily cleanup, daily magnetic sweeps so you're not having nails all over the place.

Those are some of the things that you want to keep in mind when you're about to do a roofing project. The main thing is, is it just old and is it a simple roof or is it a flat roof or does it have a lot of cuts or are you having trouble with it? Then you need to do some investigation. We will turn that over to Alan now.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Let me just say one thing to followup on what Sal said before we jump into contractors. Look, there are many, many, many fine roofing contractors in Florida. This is not intended to denigrate any of them. But in my experience and I would venture to say Sal and Alan would probably share a similar experience, when we get called in to bring investigative, potentially bring claims relating to a roofing project that has gone not so well, has gone badly, a lot of times those are projects that did not involve... I mean, it's very rare that we would come across a project where an engineer or a roofing consultant was involved in investigating and setting up a scope of work. Sal is absolutely spot on when he's talking about and especially flat roofs. We've seen a lot of projects where roofers come in and basically covered over an existing roof or some existing components of a roof and a lot of times that's a problem, least of which... Most of which. I'm not sure which way that goes, but you're relying on that existing layer of what's there and is being covered over to watertight and wind resistant.

It may not be a water issue, folks, it may be a wind issue. Unless they've done some uplift testing to determine that that substrate that they're attaching their system to is secure, you may have a roof that's not entirely resistant to high winds and hurricane winds. Those are the scenarios that we typically see is an association has either fallen under the spell of a roofing contractor or it was decided that rather than spend the money to have investigation by an engineer and an engineer involved in setting the scope of work, they've gotten that scope from the roofer. The roofer has either come up with a solution that's not a complete solution and those associations have had to deal with problems further on down the road.

Again, it may be more money, but it's money well spent because the flip side of that is if you have a claim, you're going to be paying lawyers to bring claims. It's going to take a long time. You may be having to do a roofing project in the middle of that because you've got water intrusion that can't be fixed with spot emergency fixes. You may be doing two roof projects where you thought you'd only have to do one. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Alan Tannenbaum and he's going to talk about contractor selection and this is really important in determining how to get the best contractors to come and take care of your project. So thank you, Alan. Go ahead.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Thank you. All right. The roofing contracting industry in 2021. I'll give some buyer beware tips. Number one, there are companies out there, they're not actually roofing companies, they are roof replacement marketing companies. They have very good sales people. They travel around the state. Their pricing is pretty good and they have a clause in their agreement that once you signed the contract, they can assign it to another roofing contractor and all these groups do is sign contractors up and then they shop that job to other roofing contractors and take a margin on it. Be prepared or be aware that you need to have actually a bonafide roofing contractor.

Secondly, if you have a particular manufactured system, you want to be sure that the roofing contractor you're considering is a qualified installer for that roofing manufacturer so that you in fact get a bonafide warranty on that roofing system at the end of the day. The third for a HIRA, especially where you have mechanical equipment, drains, air conditioning equipment sitting on the roof, you're not just hiring that roofing contractor, you're hiring the roofing contractor and the air conditioning subcontractor that it decides to bring in to lift up that air conditioning equipment so that the roof replacement can occur. There may be a need for a plumbing contractor to be involved to determine drain size. You may have ancillary repairs like stucco repair and so forth on mansard walls, so you need to qualify under those conditions not only the roofing contractor, but who the heck they're going to bring in under them.

Do not let your roofing contractor do plumbing and air conditioning work that's not within the purview of a roofing contractor. There's a limitation on it. There's an interesting part with permitting. The air conditioning work and plumbing work associated with a roofing replacement, it doesn't necessarily need a separate permit for the air conditioning work and the plumbing work, but what's required is that that appropriated licensed air conditioning people and plumbers actually be the ones performing that work, so qualify your contractors as to their ability to do the totality of the work. The best recommendations for roofing contractors come either from other association and managers, certainly the engineers and contractors will do it, will give recommendations also.

You need to qualify also the superintendent, the subcontractors who might be working on the job. For 40 years, I've been telling associations that you're not actually hiring a roofing company, you're hiring a superintendent and laborers that they assign to your job so you need to know who they're sending. You can get their resumes and qualify them and make sure you get one of their top superintendents coming out. There's a lot of good contractors who take an extra job that they don't have the manpower for and something usually goes wrong on the job where they've either hired a journeyman superintendent and now they're assigned to your job, so you need to qualify.

The most important thing besides third party supervision I think that contractors will always perform better when they know somebody with knowledge is watching what they're doing and you're likely to get better performance. But we go back to the fact that without clear plans and specifications, it's impossible to determine and compare bids. Like Sal said, if you got a one page agreement and it says roof replacement and you have a bid for $60,000 and another one for $80,000 and another one for $100,000, they're not even comparable because you don't know what they're going to do. You also don't know how well insured they are and you don't know if they've even paid their workers comp. There's a lot about qualifying a contractor beyond looking for the lowest number.

There are good ones out there. There are bad ones out there, but I had third category, which is contractors with a really good reputation who happen to do a bad job on your roof because of who they send out or they're too busy or they're subbing things out that they shouldn't. Keep all those considerations in mind. That's my nutshell there, Jon.

As you mentioned, one thing that's important is that the manufacturer may do inspection, but what they're looking for is just whether their particular product was installed the way it should have. They're not looking necessarily at the way the air conditioning systems were remounted. They may not be looking at the flashing. Their warranty is qualified to saying that our system was installed per our manufacturer specifications, but they don't give a totality specification generally for the entire reroofing project so you just can't count on that.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Yeah. To amplify something that Alan said, if you're getting multiple bids or proposals or estimates, it's so important to have on the front end a defined scope of work that was set by somebody like an engineer or a highly qualified roofing consultant, and there are some very good ones out there, because then you know that you're getting estimates that are apples to apples and that is key to making a quality choice. You know that if you're taking the least or lowest estimate out of three, they're all competing on the same playing field and they're all estimating the same scope of work. Certainly, the engineer or the consultant can be vital in helping you evaluate those estimates. 

Okay. Let's talk about contract drafting because that's kind of where the rubber hits the road in terms of as association being able to take some steps to really control its risk in this project being completed on time, being completed properly and without problems. We're going to a little bit of time here and walk through some key things that should be in any reroofing contract. We have a whole course, folks, that covers this. We could spend at least an hour, so I apologize in advance if we're going to run through it a little bit quicker. But if you want, you can, the next time we deliver the course, the in-depth course on repair contracts, key provisions in repair contracts, please join us. But I'm going to run through some of the key areas for contract drafting.

Sal brought up an interesting point. He said he's seen projects, and we all have. We've all seen projects where you got a pretty sophisticated reroofing project that's covered by a one page contract and I would venture to say a lot of you folks and managers have faced that situation too. On the other hand, we've seen the full AIA contract that's 15 pages long with its attending general conditions document. I'm not saying one is necessarily any better than the other, probably a one page contract is not going to cover all the bases, but do you need the full AIA long form contract? Probably not, depending upon the nature of your project and the size of it. The takeaway is not how many pages the contract is, the document is, whether it's an AIA document or not, as long as the document covers some very key elements, it can be the AIA form, it can be in a different format or template, but it's important to have a couple of very specific things, some key things that should be in there.

Let's talk first about careful specification of what constitutes contract documents. Okay. I've seen contracts that haven't clearly spelled out what constitutes the terms of the agreement between the association and the roofer. By that, I mean what is the scope of work, whether there are drawings that need to be followed, whether there are engineering specifications that need to be followed. The very first, and especially if you've spent the money to have an engineer involved or a roofing consultant involved, it's important that your contract document specify the engineer's specifications, the engineer's drawings if they've done some. If the roofing consultant has done specifications and drawing, that should be specified. If there's going to be a warranty involved, let's see the form of the warranty that the roofer is going to issue.

I'm not talking about the manufacturer's warranties, a lot of roofers though will provide a warranty on their workmanship. Well, let's see that warranty up front, that form. Let's make that form part of the contract so that you know going into it exactly what kind of warranty you're going to be getting when this project is completed. I've seen many a project where you're arguing over the terms of the warranty after it's too late. So if you have an engineer involved and the engineer has done a project manual, obviously you'll probably have a form contract that's going to specify everything that needs to be in there, but if you haven't gone that route, it's very, very important to make sure that the contract specifies what documents constitute the work that is to be done. That may rely on some others that need to be part of that.

The second main area that you'll want any good reroofing contract to address is the draw schedule. How is the roofer going to be paid? Let's think about a typical roofing company. Every morning, that owner or that general manager, whoever's in charge of running the day-to-day operations of that roofer, he or she wakes up in the morning and has to determine how they're going to staff the seven, eight, 10, 20 different project that they've got going at any one time. Okay. They're going to send their best folks to the project that is either giving them the most grief or has the highest amount of risk to the roofer. The best way that an association can control risk and ensure that that roofer has some continuing day-to-day risk on the project is through the draw schedule or through any of the provisions in the contract about how that roofer gets paid, progress payments.

You want to make sure that the way the roofer is paid during the progression of the job is in a way that that roofer is not... they haven't gotten their profit paid to them yet. There's a lot of different ways you can do that. I can't tell you a specific way, but typically you want to make sure that you're minimizing any deposits that you pay upfront because a lot of times the deposit is the profit. The more of the profit you pay upfront, the less that that roofer is incentivized to come and complete your project on time or in a diligent fashion.

If you can't get away from having to pay some sort of deposit, then you want to negotiate for the lowest amount of deposit or you want to redress that, if you will, that's probably not the right word, but you can maybe build in some retainage on progress payments and pull some of that back to ensure that the roofer completes on time and free of defects. The draw schedule is the best way to, one of the best ways, to ensure that every morning what that roofer is determining who he's going to send and where he's going to send them to, he's going to be looking at your association's reroofing project and saying, "I got to get this thing done because if I don't get it done, I'm in the hole. I'm negative here. I don't have my profit on this job. I'll earn my full profit on this job until I complete it." Don't ever give them a reason to get paid what they're going to ultimately make early on.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Jon, the bottom line from my perspective is that you don't want the contractor that having paid 80% of the purchase price when only 60% of the work has been completed because it's awfully difficult to get them out at that juncture.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Right. Project supervision is another key area. Who for the owner is going to be responsible for day-to-day supervision of the project? I've seen many a situation where it's they've designated somebody on the board because they've had some sort of experience or because they've dealt with a roof replacement before. There may be some people on the board that are very qualified to do these things, I'm not saying that. But even if you haven't hired an engineer or a consultant to design your project, it's always worth considering having somebody come in, a third party come in and oversee and supervise the completion of the project and take a look at what the roofer is doing, inspect their work as the project progresses, somebody who's got experience in that area because that's usually one of the first... If a qualified person is doing that, they can nip problems in the butt obviously.

If the roof is not going on the right way, it's better to learn that early rather than later because later may mean a complete tear off and redo; whereas earlier may be, "Okay, we've got to take a section and redo it," and it's not a huge problem, so think about and have some provisions in your contract regarding project supervision. Subcontractors. Alan touched on this and especially in the area where you've got other things like air conditioning work that needs to be done, plumbing work that needs to be done, you want to have the ability to know who those subs are going to be that the roofer is bringing to do that work and you want to have some ability to maybe make some objections to that. So at the very least, you should negotiate or try to negotiate a provision which requires the roofer to tell you who else he's going to bring to the job and to allow you to have some opportunity to object or reject those subcontractors. Now, a lot of times you may not get away with being able to reject them, but you should know who they are.

Who determines completion? Does the roofer get to say the project is complete? And completion is a key element in a contract because that may determine final payment. You've got warranties that flow from that. It's evidence that maybe come back to haunt you if you ever have to bring a claim or the statute to repose, so substantial completion or completion of the project is a very important date to fix and should be fixed cavalierly. So are you going to let the roofer determine that or are you going to have an engineer involved who gets to make that decision or a roofing consultant who gets to make that decision? Obviously, I think you know what we would recommend.

How are in-project disputes handled? If you are unhappy with something that the roofer is doing, how are you going to handle that? Is there a mechanism for dealing with that? Are you going to have weekly progress meetings with the roofer? Are they going to do weekly inspections where you get to look at the work and have a meeting to review what's been done? All of that is key. Here's a biggie. Alan touched on this. Nonassignability. I can't tell you how many times we've seen roofing projects where you've signed a contract with somebody and you've got a completely different entity that shows up to do the work. If you picked a roofer for a reason, then make sure that that roofer isn't going to assign the contract or sub the work out to some other roofer. Those clauses are very rarely in contracts and so it's important that you take a look and make sure that you negotiate that into your contract.

The next thing is near and dear to our arts as lawyers, as litigators, because we usually end up dealing with the aftermath of a project gone bad and that's alternative dispute resolution. We'll often see contracts which require arbitration. We don't like those. Arbitration is not all it's cracked up to be in our experience. You'll hear that it's cheaper, it's faster, but, A, it's not necessarily cheaper because the cost to file a lawsuit at Circuit Court is, I don't know, I think like $405. On a couple hundred thousand or a few hundred thousand dollar roofing project, the filing fees at the American Arbitration Association may be thousands of dollars, plus you pay the arbitrator's fees hourly, so it's not necessarily cheaper.

I don't know, maybe faster, but you don't get discovery, you don't get full discovery, you don't get to take depositions under the American Arbitration Association rules, so that's a potential problem. Folks, at the end of the day, we don't recommend arbitration. Certainly in most cases, we would want to be in Circuit Court in front of a jury and so it's important to make sure that your contract doesn't require you to waive your right to a jury trial. We've seen plenty of contracts that we were not involved in negotiating and where we're now bringing a claim that have not had a prevailing party attorney's fee clause and that may be a problem. We would want a method for recovering our client's attorney's fees for bringing a claim for a roof project that was defective and so you need to take a look and see whether there are provisions in the contract for prevailing party attorney's fees.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Very quickly, we want to answer these questions.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Final payment. How long do you have to do your final payment and release any retainage and under what conditions? That's essential as well.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

I want to get to some questions. Richard asked how to find a top notch engineer. We do know of some good ones. Do they perform the same in every job? Just like a contractor, sometimes you run into a glitch. If you hire an engineering firm, make sure the person they assign to you is actually one of their roofing specialists. Sometimes they have that capability sometimes not, but we can make some recommendations on that. I think, again, some other management companies and associations might know who they've had a good experience with. Barry asked a question about work that was done by an owner above the roof line. I bet that's an HOA, I hope it is. Who's responsible? Depending on how it was entered into and what your documents say, usually if an owner adds an improvement, it's on them to either remove it so that you can do a proper reroofing job or not, but the devil is always in the detail with documents.

Somebody asked a question about allowances and it's a very good question because, for instance, you may enter into a roofing job, you have a wood deck and there's an allowance per square foot or for board foot of the sheathing removal and replacement. Number one, you want to make sure that the price that the contractor's putting on replacing sheathing is a market price and they don't have an extortionate number for it. Secondly, you need to quantify how much, when it's opened up, how much wood actually needs to be pulled off the roof and how much is being pulled is being pulled off the roof because all of a sudden you get an overage of $30,000 or $50,000 at the end of the job and the wood that was removed has already gone into the dumpster and been taken away and how would you ever verify how much the contractor did, so that's a very good question and it ends up being a real problem.

Somebody, I think Mark [Spursion 00:53:49], mentioned that you also have to be careful of what type of products are going to be installed. There are different types of roofing systems. They carry different types of warranties. Definitely, your choice of roofers should also include vetting the roofing system that they're proposing to install because they are all different types of quality warranty limitations and so forth that come with the roofing project. There's one question about fiduciary responsibility. What is an HOA property management and board's responsibility to ensure proper funding of reserves under Florida statutes and case law? Well, the board has a fiduciary obligation to follow Florida statute and HOAs, there's no statutory requirement for the funding reserves. If it's in the documents, it is required.

If an HOA doesn't properly fund reserves, I doubt that that creates a case fiduciary for a fiduciary violation. It may be a poor business practice, but I don't think that it's going to create liability. So sorry, Jon, I thought we needed to get some of those questions answered.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Okay. That's fine. I want to make sure we answer the questions as well. That's good.

Alan Tannenbaum, Esq.:

Right. And we covered project supervision and completion, so Sal if you have something to say about construction defect claims that you can say in three minutes, the floor is yours.

Sal Scro, Esq.:

Yes, thanks for letting me have all this time. There was one question out there that was what about material failure on a fairly new roof? That kind of hits what I'm going to talk about. If you have a roof project, a new one that was done or one that went wrong or an existing roof that is wrong, what do you do? Well, you have four years statute of limitations to act on it, not to exceed 10 years and that 10 years is based upon when it's discovered. For example, if it's a latent defect, so the four years runs from either actual possession by the owner of the certificate of occupancy date, the date of completion of the project. If there's an abandonment of the project, which a lot of times leads to legal action, that would be the date that commences your statute of limitations. The date of the completion of a contract between the contractor, the architect, the engineer and their employer, so if you happen to employ the architect separately, then the time they've provided you with those details, that's your statute of limitations on that part of it. But typically, they're involved in larger projects so it's whichever is latest.

The statute of limitations runs four years. We're talking to community association managers here, so what do you do? You guys get complaints. You get complaints of problems with roofs, leaks, windows, anything like that, you document them because they usually come to you in writing. You talk about them in meetings, so you have meeting minutes. That documentation, what does that equal? That equals evidence. That equals evidence of your knowledge of a defective condition, which if you wait too long can hurt you, so it's good to document things, but you want to make sure you act upon them. For example, if you're having complaints of stucco cracks and you keep patching the stucco and patching the stucco. Later you find out that, well, it's not really the stucco, it's coming from the roof installation and the flashing, don't think that your discovery of that roof problem happened when you discovered it, it may have happened when you found the cracks in the stucco so it's going to be important that you investigate these issues by somebody competent to let you know, not just any contractor that goes out there.

If you see stucco cracks, you call a stucco contractor. He's going to tell you, "Okay, I'll fix your stucco." He's not going to talk about roofs necessarily and he's not going to uncover it, so it's important that you look for a competent investigator, an engineer, somebody to look into it. Usually, you go to the construction defect attorney first. That's what we do. We would recommend the right person for you to do that. One of you I know here today, we talked just recently about owner surveys and I use the word owner in quotes here. Should we send out written document... an email or a letter to all the owners and say, "Are you having any problems?" We recommended, again, if you want to talk to them, great, but if you're going to do these owner surveys, most of the time you're creating evidence, you're creating evidence that is going to probably not get you a lot of feedback and it's going to be more of a problem than it's worth.

I could talk about it for a while, but we don't have a lot of time so I want to touch on the 558 process. Before you commence any action to address construction defects, you have to give notice under Florida Statute 558 and it's specifically 558.004. If you're 20 units or less, you have to give that notice 60 days in advance. Tell them the potentially liable parties, what the defects are, what the damages are, give them a general idea of where the defect is located and they have 45 days to respond. It's 120 day pre suit notice for if you have 21 or more units and that is a 558 process for dummies statement there. There's a lot to it and it's important to use an attorney that knows how to handle these things appropriately to give the proper 558 out there.

Evidence preservation, exfoliation of evidence, destruction of evidence, that's very important. So when you're doing these investigations, it's always nice to have somebody martial it through. I know if we handle a destructive investigation, I make sure I notice the potentially liable parties. I tell them what's going to happen, when we're going to do this investigation. They can come out and look. They can't talk, they can't talk to the owners, they can't direct any of the investigation, it's our investigation. They can go out there and watch it and they can see what's there so they can't say we destroyed any of the evidence and the people you have out there doing it, it's documented. Sometimes this comes into question if you have emergency repairs, water coming in. Well, managers, direct somebody to take pictures before, during, after. Videos are good, but we don't want closeups. You got to start far out so we know what you're talking about.

I can't tell you how many times I get a picture of a round wet spot in ceiling that doesn't tell me anything. I need to have something back to look at to say, "This is the building. This is the street, the building, the unit number, the interior," and then you can zoom in on it. There's a lot to talk about on that, but the main thing is you have four years from discovery, not to exceed 10 years. So any of you with buildings or improvements that were done, any renovation projects that were done that are 10 years or less and you're not sure about their condition, my recommendation would be get a competent person to go out there, do a walk around, do an inspection. We know people that will go out there a lot of times and just do a free walk around if it's something that you think you're having a concern with.

If you're not having concern, obviously these engineers aren't readily available to run out there, but if that's the situation, it's always good to do. Thanks.

Jon Lemole, Esq.:

Okay. So roofs are your first line of defense to water intrusion. One of the most important components of your buildings. You've got reroof your building, the takeaway today is to follow best practices. We've laid them out for you. If you have any questions about a project that you may be contemplating undertaking, reach out to us or reach out to a construction lawyer to help walk you through what would be some of the key things to do in order to make sure that the project goes well. We thank you all for joining us today, you managers. I think Michelle will take care of getting you all of your credit reported to the DBPR. Hopefully we'll see you on our next panel, so thank you very much for joining us.